Understanding the nature and meaning of unstructured information presents significant challenges that far exceed the capabilities of typical business intelligence tools that were, for the most part, designed and built for handling that is structured.

Thank you Brian I was able to get audio today however it kept cutting out costantly in the begining I just kept clicking the forward button for the first few miniuts and the audo began to work. It was intermittent several times during the whole lecture however I was able to hear the presentation. I lost the first three days of audio. We should have good telecomunications from now on.

So true re: util companies. Nor would we want them to given current tech. what would be fascinating is to see a modeling effort re: the ramp of energy demand driven by IT over time. Obviously we are going to need some really powerful tech calvary to come to the rescue before the brown stuff hits the fan!

Consider what is happening today - Google wantred to build a new data center in WA. We have plenty of hydro power in the NW, but still to get all of the power they needed they bought an aluminum smelter that had power rights. They closed the factory down to get the power.

@BrianBailey - yes, they do but it's like buying things in brown paper wrappers. It's a huge question we deal with every day. Not only the social engineering issues from hackers, but legal issues should i leak financial transaction data.

As for power usage, for the first time I recently heard someone give a presentation about effectively managing power end production of electricity. This is an awesome idea and interesting approach to solving it.

If your mobile carrier (MC) can tell that you shopped at merchant A and merchant B who are competitors, can the MC sell that intel (minus the actual personal PMI info) to those merchants? You're the target for posting real-time "value add services" to your device. Do you feel that's invasion of your privacy? Note that financial targeting of mobile devices (in lieu of your email address) is driving innovation (funding it) much like Google data mining pays for broadband advancements. Not only phones, but now your TVs, media centers, etc. are also targets.

Our company is a financial processor, so we interact w/ POS systems, mobile pay, etc. all the way to banks and card associations. In between there, it's all about the data, fraud risk, integrity, compliance, legal issues, marketing, data mining, and oh yes......taps by gov'ts.

to the chatters: How does you company fit into this. Is it a company that will primarily create data, such as being a maker of sensors, A user of data in that you extract value from a data source, or an infrastructure provider that produces the tools that enable either of the other two?

The data I handle is related to the process being controled which is of value only to those controling the process at the moment. It has no frame of reference to anyone who is not familiar with the equipment.

to our chatters: How valuable do you think data is? Think about your company. What percentage of your value is tied to information, knowledge that your company holds. Take a guess? What percentage would you place on it?

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